ABSTRACT
Since 1999 the Bologna Process (BP) and the consequent launch of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 2010 constitutes a cornerstone policy initiative for the development and evolution of European Higher Education (EHE). This contribution aims to examine the Ministerial Conferences' official statements of the 20 years of the process, with a particular focus on the evolutions, alterations, fragmentations, and discontinuities identified in their discursive representations. For the exploration of the official documents I use Sheridan's (1990) appreciation of Foucauldian discourse as means for analysing policy documents tangled with Ball's (1993) notion of the ‘Policy Cycle’. The discursive examination highlights the change of the policy focus of the BP, as Quality Assurance (QA) is discursively replaced by the notion of Social Dimension. This change introduces a policy effect that calls primarily on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) for action rendering national policy implementation as secondary.
